Tornados, terrorism, and mythical beasts

The winds begin to rotate—and not into the milder dust devils that sometimes happen during harmattan—but into powerful funnel tornados that suck up anything in its path, billboards, cars, houses. Tornados are famous in literary and film history for being the magical mode of transportation that took Dorothy from her colourless mundane life in Kansas […]

The winds begin to rotate—and not into the milder dust devils that sometimes happen during harmattan—but into powerful funnel tornados that suck up anything in its path, billboards, cars, houses. Tornados are famous in literary and film history for being the magical mode of transportation that took Dorothy from her colourless mundane life in Kansas to the magical Technicolor Oz. But in real life, those picked up by Tornados turn out dead, except for those rare cases you hear about where someone survived whirling around in a bathtub and put down, naked and terrified, dozens of miles from where they begun. They say the best place to be when a tornado comes is the basement of a house, the underground rooms enclosed within strong walls of earth. If there is no basement, the pre-recorded radio warnings say “proceed to a small enclosed room on the lowest level of the house.” They say a bathroom is the best place to be. If you have no basement, you should sit in a bathtub with pillows and with a blanket over your head in case the roof falls in.
When my grandmother was a teenager in America’s southernmost state of Florida, in the 1930s, a tornado took the roof off their house. She and her sister were sleeping in the parlour of their small wood-frame house. They heard a sound like a freight train rushing over them, and suddenly they were being buffeted by rain. The tornado had taken the roof but had left them clinging to each other below. They ran screaming for their parents and ended up spending the rest of the night, trying to drag furniture to cover, finally huddled in their parents’ room which still had a portion of the roof attached.
Now seventy-five years later, her granddaughter lives on the second story of a house in tornado season. I have no access to the lower level of the house, so when the tornado sirens placed around the city screeched for the first time last week, I imagined myself having finally finished the PhD only to be whirled off by a tornado. My small apartment has a shower but no bathtub. The only place for me to go was the closet, so I sat in there surrounded by shoes and bags of clothing I had prepared to give away, trying to read a book amidst wild winds and the muffled sirens from outside. I strained my ears to hear the rumble of the freight train my grandmother spoke of and was grateful for my emergency-warning screeching android phone on which I could follow the progress of the storm on weather.com. Eventually at around 1am, I could read no more and was tired of sitting cramped in the closet, so I crawled out of my cubby hole. Though the storm still raged and the night sky was a dull pink outside (surely not a good sign), I committed myself to God and climbed into my bed.
The next day, I asked my landlord where I could go in case of a tornado. He told me the key to my front door also worked on a side door of the house that has been partitioned into nearly 10 different tiny flats. I could reach the basement that way. Two mornings later, at around 7am the sirens screeched again, and the radio said there were tornados heading towards my neighbourhood. I had put tea on to boil and was cooking oatmeal for breakfast. But the sky was so dark and the winds so fierce and the radio warnings so urgent that I turned off the gas and dumped my half cooked oatmeal into a bowl, grabbed my bag with my laptop and ran outside in the torrential rain to fumble with the lock to the door on the side of the house. Narrow steps led down to the dark musty basement, where I found a banjo and a table and chairs covered with cobwebs and. I sat on one of the dusty chairs against a wall and ate my soggy half-cooked oatmeal, seasoned by rainwater. I tracked the tornado warning on my phone for about an hour until the storm passed. Later, I saw photos of the tornado damage, 18 wheeler trucks turned on their sides, ripped open with their good tumbling out, houses with roofs partially torn off, trees snapped and twisted off. These tornados were mild, not like the ones that devastated Tuscaloosa, Alabama a few years ago, where huge portions of the city were devastated and hundreds of people were left homeless. The year 2011 was one of the worst tornado outbreaks ever recorded leaving at least 340 people across the United States dead.
I think about this strong power, this force of nature no one can control, the path of which no one can predict. In America, scientists have bent so many forces of nature to human control: plants are manipulated and engineered to produce the largest shiniest fruit; chickens are engineered to have such huge breasts for eating that they can barely stand upright. There is so much technology to aid consumption. Against the tornados that ravage through the continent, however, America can do nothing, except track them and issue warnings, screeching sirens outside and on our phones, which give us a few minutes warning. The only thing we can do in the face of these monsters is to run down into caves of earth, to huddle and to hide.
I think of Tornados as I read the latest news out of Nigeria, A bomb at the College of Hygiene in Kano. Around 60 more women and 30 boys abducted in Borno. Dozens if not hundreds of villages in the northeast devastated. We can’t control forces of nature like tornadoes, earthquakes, or tsunamis—though human planning and organization can reduce deaths and reverse some human-caused environmental disasters like desertification, pollution, and floods. But we should be able to control human violence. I think of what a perfect place Nigeria would be to live with its beautiful landscape, rich cultures, and lack of major natural disasters (other than manmade ones) if it had not been so abused and exploited by the greedy and the corrupt, by the British, by the military, by the politicians, by the militants, ordinary people caught between.
There are some things we can’t fight. There are some things we just have to be wise about, to know when to take shelter and put our heads down and hope it passes over us this time, once again. But there are other things we can fight. There are some things we have to stand up for. We must fight terrorism and militancy, yes, but we also need to fight the conditions that led to it, the corruption, neglect and inefficiency that has led to poverty and environmental devastation and the institutionalized intolerance and violence that has contributed to Boko Haram ideology.
In Greek mythology, there was a monster called the hydra. Every time you cut off one of the serpent’s head, two more would grow back in its place. The story goes that the hero Heracles sought the help of his nephew Iolaos to cauterize the stump from each head so that it wouldn’t grow back. He found that it wasn’t enough to get rid of the threat, you had to get rid of the conditions that allowed it to grow in the first place.
This suggests a two-pronged approach: defensive warnings systems in the short term, a larger and more comprehensive addressing of environmental concerns that lead to war in the long term. Allah ya kiyaye.